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A Short History of Celebrity This page intentionally left blank To view this page, please refer to the print version of this book. Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Inglis, Fred. A short history of celebrity / Fred Inglis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-13562-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Celebrities—History. 2. Celebrities—Biography. 3. Fame— Social aspects—History. 4. Fame—Psychological aspects— History. 5. History, Modern. 6. Popular culture—History. 7. Civilization, Modern. I. Title. D210.I525 2010 305.5’2—dc22 2009050143 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Garamond and ITC Golden Cockeral Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 For Jessie and Abby Guardians of the Middle Station This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements ix part i Fame and Feeling 1. The Performance of Celebrity 3 2. A Very Short History of the Feelings 19 part ii The Rise of Celebrity: A Three-Part Invention 3. The London–Brighton Road, 1760–1820 37 4. Paris: Haute Couture and the Painting of Modern Life 74 5. New York and Chicago: Robber Barons and the Gossip Column, 1880–1910 108 part iii The Past in the Present 6. The Geography of Recognition: Celebrity on Its Holidays 135 7. The Great Dictators 158 8. The Stars Look Down: The Democratisation of Celebrity 187 9. From Each According to His Ability: Sport, Rock, Fashion, and the Self 217 10. Stories We Tell Ourselves about Ourselves 247 Envoi: Cherishing Citizens 270 Notes 289 List of Illustrations 303 Index 305 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements This book was first conceived while I was Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Connecticut, and I am exceed- ingly grateful to its director, Dick Brown, and to my co-fellow, Ross Miller (Arthur’s nephew), for their encouragement and suggestive criticisms; in particular I would also like to thank the institute’s admirable administra- tor, JoAnn Waid, for all her kindness and energetic thoughtfulness during my stay. In the event, I later put this book aside to work on my biography of R. G. Collingwood, History Man, and it was during that period that I came so happily under the attentive care of my present editor at Princeton Univer- sity Press, Ian Malcolm, and he was readily persuaded to take my proposal to his colleagues and return with a contract. I then wrote the thing headlong, for some of the time while occupy- ing a Visiting Fellowship in the handsome surroundings of the Humani- ties Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra to whose director, Debjani Ganguly, I owe repeated thanks for her intellec- tual hospitality. I also aired some of these thoughts at Massey University, New Zealand, at the invitation of my old and cherished friend, Joe Grixti, as well as at the University of Warwick, thanks to two other such patrons and honoured friends, Joe Winston and Jonothan Neelands, as a result of whose good offices I am now an honorary professor at their university. Mostly, however, the writing of this book was done at home in my study in Somerset, and its large, indistinct, and protean subject matter came and went according to the rhythms of domestic life and the great happiness of scholarly retirement. A useful hand was early loaned by Richard How- ells, and the manuscript was much exhilarated as well as improved by the readers’ reports written by Dr. Howells and by Professor Tara Brabazon at a later stage. As usual, a difficult and handwritten manuscript was regu- larly dispatched to Carol Marks and punctually returned in perfect elec- x acknowledgements tronic form. Finally, the presence of my late and much mourned friend and guide, Clifford Geertz, is discernible in every chapter. Essentially, however, the book was written in solitude which, given its civic subject matter, is a bit rum. I suppose that nonetheless it represents an effort by an ageing citizen-scholar, unregenerate Englishman and old Labourist, devoted husband, father, grandfather, to name for what it is what is horrible in our society. But it is also, and much more so, an argu- ment with which to resist uttering any slack-jawed curse over the ten- dencies of the times to be going to the dogs, and a search in our public narratives as these are dramatised by celebrity and told by history, for all there is to celebrate indeed, of the best we can do on behalf of our anxious happiness, and of all manner of things that are well. Chapter 1 the performance of Celebrity his is a history book. Insofar as it offers a theory of itself, it is a the- Tory of historical sedimentation, transformation, re-creation. It is the theory that we live, wittingly and involuntarily, the assorted versions of our selves and our society which history has deposited within us. Nothing much to say about that except that history is not a vast undifferentiated force coming at us with a capital H, but an irresistible series of tiny, invis- ible infiltrations which sidle along our bloodstream and oscillate in our thoughts and feelings. Insofar as we become conscious of these invasions, we do so by way of shaping them into narratives grand or small, but even the grandest are made up and made out of the bits and pieces of the many disjointed expe- riences and unintelligible events of the past, rearranged and re-created for a different present. The usefulness of fame for the purposes of this simple historical lesson is that the concept serves to pick out those lives and ways of life which shaped themselves into the significant constellations of the past and pro- vided quite a lot of people with stars to steer by. When we add to that the general scholarly agreement that modernity may usefully be taken as pick- ing up speed from round about the middle of the eighteenth century, then a history of the fairly new concept of celebrity may tell us plenty about what is to be cherished and built upon as well as what is to be despised and ought to be destroyed in the subsequent invention of modern society. My most pointed moral is that the business of renown and celebrity has been in the making for two and a half centuries. It was not thought up by the hellhounds of publicity a decade ago. Consequently, if we load its discussion and evaluation down with the mass of time, we might be able to lend some gravity to the shallow and violent lightness of being attributed to fame in our day. What follows is full of such historical examples, of indi- vidual life stories which neither constitute a sample nor provide epitomes. 4 c h a p t e r 1 They are instances of something, cases in point. Examples instruct; they do not prove. II Celebrity is everywhere acknowledged but never understood. It is on ev- erybody’s lips a few times every week; it is the staple of innumerable maga- zines on either side of the Atlantic, whether in the glossy and worshipful guise of Hello! and Glamour or the downright fairytale telling and men- dacity of the National Enquirer and Sunday Sport; it fills a strip cartoon in (where else?) Private Eye and provides all the dailies, whether tabloid or broadsheet, with the contents of news, op-ed, gossip, and, not infre- quently, contributed columns. Celebrity is also one of the adhesives which, at a time when the realms of public politics, civil society, and private domestic life are increasingly fractured and enclosed in separate enclaves, serves to pull those separate entities together and to do its bit towards maintaining social cohesion and common values. Nonetheless, in societies like ours priding themselves on having reduced the aura of deference; on having opened their élites to popular talent; on their mingling of high old art and new low popular culture with a fine egalitarian hand, it is something of a surprise to find quite so many people in thrall to the power of that same celebrity, and to those who, involuntarily or otherwise, carry it along with their lives. One way to catch hold of this change will be to notice how celebrity has largely replaced the archaic concept of renown. Renown, we shall say, was once assigned to men of high accomplish- ment in a handful of prominent and clearly defined roles. A sixteenth- century jurist, cleric, senior mercenary, or scholar was renowned for bring- ing honour to the office he occupied. He might be acclaimed in the street, but the recognition was of his accomplishment—his learning (in the case of John Donne, for instance), his victories (as Othello is acclaimed in the play), his implacable power (in the case of Cardinal Wolsey). Renown brought honour to the office not the individual, and public recognition was not so much of the man himself as of the significance of his actions for the society. the performance of celebrity 5 This historical difference is readily studied by way of the fame of one of the very few women of historical renown in the period before celebrity be- came a feature of the individualisation of fame.